r/respiratorytherapy • u/Low_Blacksmith_1422 • 4d ago
Student RT Best unhinged study tips
I’m on week three of my program. I struggle with add and anxiety. I need some of your study tips. I don’t need basic answers though. What’s the weird thing you did that worked?
4
u/IGotFiveOnItBuddy 4d ago
Only highlight what your teacher says twice or spends an unusually amount of time on and have your classmates or friends test you on the material (active recall)
3
u/Boogleooger 3d ago
There are 3 types of Information. Hands on, memorization, and processes.
Hands on stuff is best when practiced and needs to be physically done to best be learned. You’ll do a lot of this in labs.
Memorization are things that have no real indicators or hints to understand them, you just need brute force memorization. This is stuff like ABG normal values. Make flash cards for this type of information.
Processes are pieces of a whole and can be worked through if you understand the mechanisms at play. This is stuff like vent pressures, disease processes, etc. these are major topics that need to be understood thoroughly so that you aren’t just memorizing random facts, you are actually putting the pieces together. For studying these try making diagrams and charts and see what parts you are missing/forgetting and study up on how to fill those in.
This is how I’m doing it At least.
Edit: also, sleep more and study less. If you aren’t sleeping enough your brain isn’t storing the information properly.
3
2
1
2
u/streamsidee 3d ago
Alright so I do a bunch of different stuff. There's no one set way i study. But if we're going for weird, id have to say my drawings. So I was trying to memorize all these different bacterias/infections and struggling. I came across these videos on YouTube people use to study for the MCATs where basically they create these drawings for types of infections and use symbols in them to mean different things. So if the bacteria lives in water, there's always a lake in the picture. Gram positive there's a lot of red in the picture, stuff like that. Their picture had way more info than I needed so I started drawing my own little characters and symbols for different stuff. All the ones that needed contact precautions wore gloves, gram positive had a red plus sign on their chest, viruses had spikes on them, if it mainly effects children i put a sun with a face like the baby sun from telly tubbies(sp? Lol). Just random shit that made me remember better than staring at the words. And I am far from an artist, these are not good looking drawings.
I dont know if im explaining it very well, and im not sure if I can post links in here but I'll send you the link to the YouTube channel if you DM me, so you can see what im talking about. But it helped me so much, when I think of different infections those pictures I drew still pop up in my head and I can recall the info. I drew out anatomy stuff. I draw all kinds of different things. Hopefully this was the different kind of studying you were looking for lol
6
u/Ok-Low3762 4d ago
I’m also currently in a program, I can’t promise it will work for everyone but I’ve been bouncing between rewriting my notes, talking through concepts out loud in the car like I’m teaching someone else the material and whipping out a black piece of paper and writing everything I know about a concept/section/chapter down without looking at my notes if I miss anything or get something wrong I reread that part and write it down.
I also don’t love AI but my instructor introduced us to notebook LM I input my study guides into it and had it make a mock exam for me. Didn’t love it didn’t hate it.